The MacBook Air Coming This Year Could Reportedly Come With Quad-Core Processors Right off the Bat

The MacBook Air model that is being sold on Apple’s website and several other online retailers still features Intel’s old and outdated fifth-generation processors codenamed the Broadwell series, so it is high time that Apple introduces a refresh that will come much better raw performance capabilities. Turns out, there is a chance, Apple will be doing just that.

A report from Economic Daily News states that the MacBook Air model that will be released this year is going to feature quad-core processors. Now, the notebook cannot harness the processing performance of a desktop chip, but what it can use is a product from the Intel Kaby Lake-R series. Till the seventh-generation series of the company’s processors, which are known as the Kaby Lake series, notebooks came with dual-core processors but the game has changed drastically.

Laptops and portable computing machines are able to deliver improved processing prowess thanks to Intel’s Kaby Lake-R series, which are also known as the eight-generation processor lineup. Instead of having dual-core configurations, these have a total of four cores for ultrabooks, and an Intel UHD 620 Graphics iGPU, resulting in increased graphical and compute performance.

The base model of the MacBook Air could feature a Core i5-8250U, which is a quad-core processor running at a base clock speed of 1.6GHz and a Max. Turbo Frequency of 3.4GHz. If the MacBook Air features an improved thermal design, the processor will be able to run at those maximum clock speeds for increased periods, giving you the performance that you desired but could not experience it from the current-generation MacBook Air.

If the MacBook Air does get released, the announcement might take place during the September 2018 keynote, where the latest generation of iPhone models are going to be unveiled. Apple has already released the 2018 MacBook Pro family and they come equipped with the Touch Bar feature so the future release could occupy the lower-priced section of the company’s product portfolio.

With the MacBook Air, we could see a row of function keys and an affordable price for buyers that want to experience macOS and a little bit of performance from a portable machine as well.